Bad ICO advertising

5 min readJun 6, 2018

As soon as we registered FairWin on several ICO trackers and showed some activity in social media, we were showered with advertising and cooperation offers. Approximately 70 % of them turned out to be fake.

At first we tried to respond to all letters, scrupulously writing down the offers in a separate table to analyse them later and plan the advertising budget. When the number of offers reached 200, we started to eliminate fakes and write down only those variants that seemed more or less worthwhile. But the table became ever longer, letters were more and more numerous and we simply could not find the time to respond to them.

The table has not helped the advancement of our project. But from the point of view of market understanding and ICO marketing it has turned out to be an inexhaustible source of knowledge.

These are the main types of ICO-hunters whom almost all ICOs meet.

1. Intermediaries

These guys promise that top mass-media will write about your ICO. The managers name quite a low price (approximately from $5000 for a publication in editions of the TechCrunch level). Their answer to the question about how they are connected to these mass-media is that they have contacts with the editors.

It is easy to fall for after you receive some hundreds of refusals to your attempts to contact large mass-media (most often they just ignore you).

There are also other smartasses who show you a big list of editions and promise that they will send your press release to all of them. It does not mean that all the twenty mass-media outlets will write about your project, they will simply receive e-mails with the release at the editor’s mail address. But the massive mailing will cost you at least 2000 dollars.

2. YouTube-amateur

It is possible to treat video ICO reviews as a separate genre of videoblogging. It would seem that different bloggers make reviews of absolutely different projects, but you can not distinguish one video from another. For an“influencer” from India to look through your site with trivial comments from the Whitepaper for a couple of minutes you need to pay approximately 4000 dollars.

3. “Hello, my name is Martin Hacks …”

When you are offered cooperation on YouTube and thrown a link to the channel and you are surprised to see there suitable content, high activity and a bunch of subscribers — most likely, you have been talking to a fake.

When you ask to confirm the account, the interlocutor responds that he cannot write to you from any contact specified on the channel, but can respond to you in COMMENTS or from another e-mail address. After a while, if you try to find his contacts and reach him again, his account will appear banned or removed.

To put it briefly, in half a year at least five Martins Hacks and about three “representatives” of Boxmining have reached us.

4. “You have a good project, but very low activity on BCT”

These guys suggest you to boost the activity in social media and forums. It is not a bounty program — they take fiat money or at least Bitcoin or Ether for their services. The prices start at $1000.

5. Investor bases

Any project has received these crazy offers to purchase bases of investors. Maybe, this method worked in the summer of 2017, although practically no one possessed such bases then, but now I have strong doubts about the efficiency of such spam distribution.

6. Advertising on Telegram channels

As a rule, owners of a few Telegram channels approach you with such offers. They propose posting on several platforms at once during a short time interval — from one week to one month. The closer the ICO, the more often the posts about your project appear on the channel.

In some cases (if the person who has contacted you is not fake), it will help you to draw attention to the project and raise the site traffic, but I advise you against counting on it.

All these ICO advertising offers remind me of an eastern bazaar with you as a tourist. You go to this huge market, carrying a thick wallet in your pocket (at least everybody thinks so). People beckon you, grab you by the clothes, put things into your hands. All around you child pickpockets sneak striving to pull out your wallet as soon as you get distracted and start talking to somebody.

When you decide to buy something, they name the highest price but, as soon as you turn to leave, they start to bargain. Here there are no laws or rules, at least not the ones that you are used to, it’s chaos, and everyone wishes to earn as much as possible before the sun sets and the market closes.

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